EL NIÑO
FIDENCIO

El Niño
Fidencio was born in 1898, in the town of Guanahuato, and came
to the town of Espinazo in 1925. He is remembered
as a childlike,
happy man. Indeed, for the hoards of sick and injured people who
came to see him, he often prescribed laughter, food, and merriment.
When
anyone gave him gifts -- and the President of Mexico seemed to, with
great frequency -- El Niño used the occasion
to share, thus lightening the otherwise gloomy existence of many
of the pilgrims. There are stories
that say that El Niño Fidencio hired musicians
so that everyone -- even arthritics and cripples -- might dance;
and everyone, it is said,
did just that.

Humorous
accounts exist of some of El Niño's cures. For instance,
he is said to have cured a mute by making him stand in front of a
swing. El Niño rocked in the swing and bumped into the
man repeatedly. The man grew so furious that he found the voice
that had eluded
him for several years. Similarly, El Niño is said to have
tricked a paralytic
into standing by tossing sweets just out of her range; she eventually
stood up to catch them before she even realized what she was doing.

Other, more
serious cures that he effected during his life were seemingly
miraculous
enough to inspire 30,000 of more modern visitors to trek
to Espinazo twice a year (in
March
and in
October,
the anniversaries of his birth and death) to pay homage to this famous
curandero. Those who are his followers -- the fidencistas who dress
in white shirts and red kerchiefs in homage to their folk hero --
are said to assume his very spirit. They are called "boxes," or
cajitas, and are thought, for the duration of their trances, actually
to become
El Niño. While they are in their trances, these cajitas also
believed to assume El Niño's miraculous healing
powers.

During his
lifetime, El Niño saw and treated thousands upon thousands
of people who came to see him for a wide range of ailments. Some
say that overwork was the cause of his death, at the age of forty,
in 1938;
and indeed, he slept only three hours per night, since he was so
busy helping those who made the special journey just to see him.
Others
say that
he was murdered while he slept. Exact details of the life and death
of El Niño are hard to come by, and some have been altered
by the human tendency to mythify already legendary lives -- for example,
folk legend
has it that El Niño, like Christ, died at the age of 33, rather
than 40.

Most
of this information is adapted from The Folk Healer: The Mexican-American
Tradition
of Curanderismo, by Eliseo Torres, Nieves Press.